Content providers sometimes provide online “answers” communities where people can seek information and opinions on various topics. Within an answers community, users understand that they rely upon information obtained therein at their own risk. For such a community to be effective, it is important to screen out bad behavior such as flaming, spamming, abusive language, and pornographic references. Such behavior can result in abuse reports.
There can be a large number of users in such a community, thereby giving rise to a high volume of user activity therein. High volumes of user activity can give rise to high volumes of abuse reports. However, abuse reports must also be verified for accuracy, so as to prevent an innocent candidate from being needlessly reprimanded or banned from the community.
One way to properly manage abuse reports is for all abuse reports to be handled by a customer care division of the content provider. A customer care division can investigate each report and decides what action should be taken for the report content. However, such investigations and actions can be time-consuming. Consequently, a mechanism for resolving disputes in an online community, including but not limited to an answers community, is desired.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.